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I decided to browse the La Times this afternoon and ran across an article by Jonah Goldberg that chided President Elect Barack Obama for proposing yet another government stimulus package to rescue the government induced economic collapse.

Note that Goldberg didn’t really attack Obama other than criticize him for proposing that the government is the solution to the problem at the same time that supposed government watchdogs in Congress have discovered that $350 Billion of our tax dollars disappeared without any explanation.

Last fall, the smartocracy said the Treasury Department had to be given $700 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program because the government had to buy all that bad paper right away. Since then, Treasury has bought no toxic assets, done nothing to help with foreclosures and, a congressional report released Friday revealed, can’t adequately explain what it did with the first $350 billion.

And then Goldberg does something that must be a foreign concept to Obama lapdogs, he suggest that taxpayers be given the tools to rescue the economy rather than divert another stimulus package to greedy businessmen that have paled up to the likes of Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd.

Economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, notes that whatever the benefits of the proposed stimulus, they probably don’t outweigh the enormous costs of the debt we would incur. As a result of the stimulus, the deficit this year would equal the total cost of the federal government in 2000. That’s on top of $7.76 trillion in bailouts pledged by the government, according to Bloomberg News.

The real reason the stimulus package will be gigantic is not that the smartest people with the best ideas say it needs to be. It’s that Obama’s real priority is to get the bill out as quickly as possible, which means every constituency gets something, including Republicans. Indeed, Republicans are a priority because if he can bribe them into supporting the bill, that might prevent them from campaigning against it in 2010 if it proves ineffective or counterproductive. Hence Obama’s proposed billions in tax breaks for corporate welfare addicts and the lobbyists who love them. Democrats are justly skeptical about a tax break for a company that decides not to lay off its workers.

And the GOP is right to question this “shovel ready” infrastructure “investment.” From World War II to the early 1990s, according to economist Bruce Bartlett, not a single stimulus bill succeeded at moderating the recession it was aimed at, while many bills helped invite the next recession. Bartlett supports a stimulus in theory (as do I); he merely notes that the political process tends to be just that — a political process — and it produces political results.

The best stimulus might be to trim — or temporarily eliminate — the payroll tax. That would put money in the hands of the people who need it — and know best how to spend it. But that would be “too ideological” because it rejects the assumption that government knows best, and it would reward taxpayers, not politicians.

This opinion by Goldberg has resulted in a rabid hateful response by the few of the remaining people that bother to read the rag.

mr. goldberg, it is people like you,with your ideological stupidity that have gotten us into this mess! your rock is waiting for you to crawl back under now!
Submitted by: suzyku

14. Why is this HACK writing for your newspaper?
Submitted by: Brad Jensen
5:16 AM PST, January 13, 2009

9. Jonah, you have absolutely no credibility to be critical on anything. You’re golden boy, George W. Bush, and his administration are the ones responsible for almost every mess the U.S. is facing right now. There may be a lot of reasons to be skeptical on a good number of Obama’s plans to help get us out of our current economic crisis but you are the last person on Earth who should be allowed to voice an opinion. In fact, you’ve been wrong on so many issues over the last eight years, I’m surprised you still have a job.
Submitted by: Jonahisatool
7:17 AM PST, January 13, 2009

10. Now that Goldberg’s conservative ideology has lead the country to a collapse so severe that everybody admits the ideology has failed, Goldberg cites the new unanimity as a point in favor of his discredited beliefs. This guy is a true ideologue.
Submitted by: Scott B.
6:34 AM PST, January 13, 2009

Get used to it. this is the American left on full display; too stupid and narrow minded to even tolerate an opinion. But it’s our fault for voting in the most worthless Republican leadership that this country has seen in decades. The American left has their legs under them because the Republican leadership and their lackeys have cut conservatives off at the knees. Congress needs an enema. Unfortunately it is still all stopped up with a bunch of yes men that couldn’t find their asses from a hole in the ground.

On a related note please read this UCLA economist article that explains why they believe FDR’s policies made the depression worse and not better; prolonging it 7 years longer than necessary.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

[...]

“Historians have assumed that the policies didn’t have an impact because they were too short-lived, but the proof is in the pudding,” Ohanian said. “We show that they really did artificially inflate wages and prices.”

Even after being deemed unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s anti-competition policies persisted — albeit under a different guise, the scholars found. Ohanian and Cole painstakingly documented the extent to which the Roosevelt administration looked the other way as industries once protected by NIRA continued to engage in price-fixing practices for four more years.

The number of antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice fell from an average of 12.5 cases per year during the 1920s to an average of 6.5 cases per year from 1935 to 1938, the scholars found. Collusion had become so widespread that one Department of Interior official complained of receiving identical bids from a protected industry (steel) on 257 different occasions between mid-1935 and mid-1936. The bids were not only identical but also 50 percent higher than foreign steel prices. Without competition, wholesale prices remained inflated, averaging 14 percent higher than they would have been without the troublesome practices, the UCLA economists calculate.

NIRA’s labor provisions, meanwhile, were strengthened in the National Relations Act, signed into law in 1935. As union membership doubled, so did labor’s bargaining power, rising from 14 million strike days in 1936 to about 28 million in 1937. By 1939 wages in protected industries remained 24 percent to 33 percent above where they should have been, based on 1929 figures, Cole and Ohanian calculate. Unemployment persisted. By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high. By comparison, in May 2003, the unemployment rate of 6.1 percent was the highest in nine years.

Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found.

“The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

-UCLA-

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